Multi-jointed Enemies in SNES Games

[Kirk_Johnston]

I've got a bee in my bonnet around so much SNES stuff these days, or, more precisely, so many claims around the Internet about SNES' not being capable of this or that by certain bad actors. The most recent one I wanted to cover was this notion that SNES can't really do multi-jointed sprites because of how "slow" it is and so on. So, to that end, I created another post addressing this very claim:

 

https://inceptionalnews.wordpress.com/2023/01/02/multi-jointed-enemies-in-snes-games/

 

And I'll add a couple of examples you can check out directly here too, just for fun.

 

There’s many multi-jointed bosses in Sparkster:

 

And a few good ones in Pop’n Twinbee (at 14:43, 23:56 and 39:50😞

 

Anyway, that's off my chest. Now I'll see whatever else comes up next. . . .

 

If you guys have any good examples of multi-jointed enemies on SNES that I haven't pointed out, feel free to share them too.

Edited January 2, 2023 by Kirk_Johnston

[Tanooki]

I don't want to/no time to watch that video right now, but seeing your description and the still shots on the videos, you're talking bosses/enemies just too large to be a sprite, so it's multiple sprites to make a large (mult-jointed) style enemy right?

Gradius III is probably the earliest one I can think of, that sprite flickering giant ass plant monster boss in the garden stage people love to point out why the SNES so-called sucks for shooters since they like to use smoke n' mirrors lies about a game rushed to market.  I quickly set a clip to start on it.

 

 

Not as impressive, but there is another Konami large undead bull monster stalking you in stage 1 of Dracula X too.

 

[Kirk_Johnston]

Yeah, they don't have to be bosses or even particularly large, but just made up of multiple moving parts, and the more the better.

[Wayler]

Here are a couple of my favorites.

 

The Mother Brain battle In Super Metroid is epic and also very cinematic in a story telling perspective

 

Even though a relatively small and easy encounter, I always liked this jumpy miniboss in Contra 3 - Stage 4. The whole stage is pretty awesome as well.

 

And the of course there's my favorite shooter Axelay, with it's badass walker robot boss (a "slight" nod to RoboCop, maybe perhaps?), concluding in the most satisfying explosion in the SNES library.

The whole path before the boss is so good when first shooting your way through a lively colony and coming to a malfunctioning and blasted door, you know something has hit the fan in a serious way. This sequence has always reminded me of Aliens, before the marines find the residents of the colony.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Kirk_Johnston]

I actually have the Contra mini-boss one in my blog examples, or should have, but the other two are great ones also. Both are slower moving enemies, not trying to show the speed of the SNES but more of a cinematic approach imo, and they just convey are real sense of gravitas and power and threat. I think the sound and way they move and how things play out really adds to selling the effect too. It's also interesting that the Axelay boss is a great and subtle use of Mode 7 in effect there too.

Edited January 4, 2023 by Kirk_Johnston

[Tanooki]

Konami were the masters when it came to going ape splicing multiple largest potential sprites together into a jointed creature of more epic proportions.  From the more stumble undead bull I pointed out, to the massive plant boss or the mode 7 stage giant crawler jumper thing in Contra 3 too.  They just did insane stuff, and sometimes it didn't even look multijointed, but it was.  A good one, looking to Japan, some of the very large bosses that the Parodius franchise had.   One is this goofy as hell giant mouth, that then has 2 squeezy hands with big fingers holding what are like cake frosting guns (1 per hand per side top and bottom) and these parts of the mouth, body, hands and bags had no overlap but were more seamless huger than should be sprites since it was jointed into one huge thing.  It was the opposite of early like the Golem boss in Super Castlevania where tricked you making it a mode 7 background instead.

[Kirk_Johnston]

13 hours ago, Tanooki said:

Konami were the masters when it came to going ape splicing multiple largest potential sprites together into a jointed creature of more epic proportions.  From the more stumble undead bull I pointed out, to the massive plant boss or the mode 7 stage giant crawler jumper thing in Contra 3 too.  They just did insane stuff, and sometimes it didn't even look multijointed, but it was.  A good one, looking to Japan, some of the very large bosses that the Parodius franchise had.   One is this goofy as hell giant mouth, that then has 2 squeezy hands with big fingers holding what are like cake frosting guns (1 per hand per side top and bottom) and these parts of the mouth, body, hands and bags had no overlap but were more seamless huger than should be sprites since it was jointed into one huge thing.  It was the opposite of early like the Golem boss in Super Castlevania where tricked you making it a mode 7 background instead.

Do you have a link to some footage of the boss with the giant mouth and hands that you mention?

 

Edit: I've found it (at the 2:17 mark):

I presume that's actually a combination of a background layer and some sprites there.

 

The next one in the video at 4:04 is pretty bonkers too.

Edited January 5, 2023 by Kirk_Johnston

[Tanooki]

No, that one I said isn't a background layer, and when it cracks in the end you can see where it drops in its various pieces.  The game is loaded with oversized sprites in there, the franchise on the whole did it too.  I have the 3 carts on the shelf here, love those games, so while out of practice I remember enough of the nutty stuff it was a stand out.  Jikkyou Oshaberi Parodius (the 3rd) has some pretty huge scale stuff going on in that one as well and used the SA1 to keep it afloat, the one in the video above is stock hardware.

[Kirk_Johnston]

1 hour ago, Tanooki said:

No, that one I said isn't a background layer, and when it cracks in the end you can see where it drops in its various pieces.  The game is loaded with oversized sprites in there, the franchise on the whole did it too.  I have the 3 carts on the shelf here, love those games, so while out of practice I remember enough of the nutty stuff it was a stand out.  Jikkyou Oshaberi Parodius (the 3rd) has some pretty huge scale stuff going on in that one as well and used the SA1 to keep it afloat, the one in the video above is stock hardware.

Well, that's pretty cool that it's all done with sprites.

[SlidellMan]

Let us not forget about R-Type 3, Super Turrican 2, and Rendering Ranger.

[Kirk_Johnston]

16 hours ago, SlidellMan said:

Let us not forget about R-Type 3, Super Turrican 2, and Rendering Ranger.

Yeah, I mentioned a couple that were good examples from Super Turrican 2 in my blog post. Do you have some links to any good examples of the multi-joined characters from those other games that you were thinking of?

Edited January 6, 2023 by Kirk_Johnston

[Tanooki]

You know since Konami is getting all the love, here's Capcom at it with Mega Man 7, a big ass robo t-rex, but also Wily and his huge walker in the end.  Also I'm 50/50 on this, but 1996's Mobile Suit Gundam Wing, a fighting game, has huge sprite gundams fighting, they seem to have parts of the bodies that move independent to the main upper and lower body sprites when it comes to hands, weapons, the feet/ankle, etc so there's a jumble of small to large sprites making up a huge fighting robot.

 

 

 

 

[Kirk_Johnston]

So, I think the main thing that's different between some of the examples above and the thing I presume Genesis fans say the SNES can't really do, which obviously it can (but maybe not to quite the degree the Genesis can), is when many parts and joints of a character are all moving and rotating completely independently, very obviously so, and being calculated in code every frame in different relative positions and angles, rather than being mostly large meta-sprites, which I think some of the characters and bosses above are most likely examples of, even if they do have a couple of independant parts.

 

I think those fighters in Endless Waltz are probably entirely meta-sprites, although there's possibly some separate elements like you say. Regardless, I personally think large meta-sprites are just as impressive too when done well.

 

With some of the large boss examples on SNES, it's often hard to tell exactly what's meta and what's multi, as they tend to have only a few animations frames, which makes it less clear they're independently moving parts all being animation smoothly in code rather than just full changes in the tiles for each pose. Although you can clearly see some parts are definitely multi-jointed for sure.

 

The SNES can clearly do meta-sprites by using a bunch of smaller ones to form a single larger sprite, or even a larger enemy made up of a few large meta-sprite parts, but I think it would be great to get even more examples where there's very patently many independent parts to a sprite all patently moving independently and rotating about on pivots and such, yet still being part of the single enemy overall. All those bosses in the likes of Alien Soldier on Genesis are the kind of thing they're obviously referring to.

 

I think we have a few great ones already, and probably enough to prove the point as is, but keep 'em coming I say.

 

PS. I really like the Wily walker boss in the Mega Man 7 game--and that's definitely made out of at least three large independent sprites that I can tell, possibly five--even if most of the separate parts aren't obviously swinging/spinning around or animating via smooth arcs, but rather smooth vertical motions. It's simply a cool and fun design that works really well on SNES.

Edited January 6, 2023 by Kirk_Johnston

[SlidellMan]

For R-Type 3, third and fifth bosses come to mind; Rendering Ranger's eighth stage had several segmented bosses.

Manfred Trenz told SNES Central that R2's consistent frame rate required clever assembly tricks.

[Kirk_Johnston]

5 hours ago, SlidellMan said:

For R-Type 3, third and fifth bosses come to mind; Rendering Ranger's eighth stage had several segmented bosses.

Manfred Trenz told SNES Central that R2's consistent frame rate required clever assembly tricks.

Actually, the thing I like most about that R-Type III boss is the way it plays with the SNES window/shape masks and HDMA and the like, which creates a very cool visual effect that I expect is actually very hard if not impossible to replicate on Genesis. I like when I see people doing stuff on SNES that's just pure "SNES" and showcases some of its cooler features and capabilities.

[Wayler]

Oh man, Rendering Ranger 2 is so cool looking. I thought it was only a run & gun game, but looks like it's a flying shooter also.

 

Here's a couple more. First it's Konami of course with Goemon 3 and this bizarre steampunky submarine with limbs and mode 7 wankery:

Then there's sections where you cause havoc as a giant robot called Impact:

 

 

And Square also dabbled with some limbage in Secret of Mana, don't think this one is that impressive though:

 

[Kirk_Johnston]

2 hours ago, Wayler said:

Oh man, Rendering Ranger 2 is so cool looking. I thought it was only a run & gun game, but looks like it's a flying shooter also.

 

Here's a couple more. First it's Konami of course with Goemon 3 and this bizarre steampunky submarine with limbs and mode 7 wankery:

Then there's sections where you cause havoc as a giant robot called Impact:

 

 

And Square also dabbled with some limbage in Secret of Mana, don't think this one is that impressive though:

 

One really interesting thing with that first boss is how it's using Mode 7 yet it looks like there's a background behind the boss, which is done via nothing more than changing the main backdrop colour down the screen on certain lines using HDMA to create the effect of there being a multi-coloured wall with some simple 3D depth to it. Using stuff like that and a couple of spare sprites can really help fake a decent second background layer when using the Mode 7 layer for some large scaling and rotating enemy or whatever, yet you don't actually see it that often in SNES games that have Mode 7 bosses and the like, and I actually wish more developers got that creative with solving the issue of there not being a proper background when using Mode 7. Sometimes you were lucky if you got anything beyond a large black background and maybe a simple platform for the characters to stand on at the bottom of the screen.

 

Here's another cool boss from a Goemon game that uses the background colour and HDMA similarly, plus some sprites for the parallax pillars: 

 

And I think that kind of thing could be taken quite a bit further on SNES in the right hands.

 

Nintendo was great at hiding the fact there couldn't be a second background layer with Mode 7, with even a very tasteful and subtle use of Mode 7 itself:

Edited January 7, 2023 by Kirk_Johnston

[Wayler]

For something other than Konami, Taito's Arkanoid has a fun final boss, where the playing field gets rotated upside down.

 

[Kirk_Johnston]

8 hours ago, Wayler said:

For something other than Konami, Taito's Arkanoid has a fun final boss, where the playing field gets rotated upside down.

 

That's actually pretty cool. And it's a nice way of using both Mode 7 and sprites to good effect.

Edited January 24, 2023 by Kirk_Johnston

[Aaendi]

Watch as Robo-Dragon transforms into Robo-Seahorse.

[TrekkiesUnite118]

24 minutes ago, Aaendi said:

Watch as Robo-Dragon transforms into Robo-Seahorse.

I assume this is in response to what I posted last night. The transformation is nice though the enemies still seem to be brain dead. When I said react to the player I didn't mean simple flipping, I mean attacks that change patterns, animations, targets, etc. based on the players movements. For an example of what I'm talking about look at Seven Force in Gunstar Heroes:

Some forms like Crab Force, Eagle Force, and Urchin Force do follow predictable patterns, but others like Soldier Force, Tiger Force, Blaster Force,and Tail Force are actually reacting to the players actions and movements. Soldier Force's arm attack you can see tracks the players movement before it fires. It throws different objects at the player depending on where they are. Tail Force will move towards the player and try to hit with it's tail. Tiger Force will track the player with it's cannon and fire at different positions. It's laser will also go in different random directions. Gun Force spins and will try to align itself to line up and shoot the player. It also does this kind of behavior when you have 2 players going.  That's the kind of behavior I was referring to.

[Aaendi]

I was working on this a couple of months ago.  I just forgot to post a video of it on youtube.

[TrekkiesUnite118]

1 minute ago, Aaendi said:

I was working on this a couple of months ago.  I just forgot to post a video of it on youtube.

Ah ok. The Enemy AI is just the bit I'm the most interested in seeing. If you can get that going I'd say that's when it would start to move into the realm of being a game more than a tech demo.

[Kirk_Johnston]

1 hour ago, Aaendi said:

Watch as Robo-Dragon transforms into Robo-Seahorse.

That's very cool, Aaendi. Great demonstration example right there, in multiple ways. Total respect.

Edited November 18, 2023 by Kirk_Johnston

[Kirk_Johnston]

Also, just because I didn't timestamp the gameplay footage of Sparkster at the specific moment I wanted to last time, nor did I include the best moments in the comment below the video, I'll post the clip again that's now set to start playing at the correct section:

 

Lovely wee multi-jointed ride and enemy there. And followed by another one right after it too.

Edited November 18, 2023 by Kirk_Johnston